news-record.com

Here are some symbols and activities from Christmases past that should be restored to Greensboro’s Yule season:

• Make the official start of the season the day after Thanksgiving, instead of the day after Halloween. In the 1940s through the early 1970s, the Christmas parade came the Friday after Thanksgiving. Upward of 100,000 people competed for curbside position. Others leaned out upper-floor windows of stores. That night, the city clicked on its downtown Christmas lights for the first time. But don’t touch the Festival of Lights. It is a wonderful modern-day addition to center city Christmases.
   
• Put the parade back on Elm Street, the main thoroughfare. Please, no excuses about Elm being too narrow for the towering balloons now vital to the parade. A way could be found to squeeze in the Cat in the Hat and Woody Woodpecker.
   
• Bring Christmas tree lots back downtown. Long ago, people came to an area along North Eugene Street near the present ballpark. Workers hammered X-shaped stands to the tree bases, then huddled to keep warm around a rusty barrel of burning wood. The smell wafted for blocks, adding to the Christmas atmosphere. December always seemed cold back then.
   
• Spray Christmas trees silver again. Does anyone do this anymore?
   
• Do the impossible and return the late C.W. (Moon) Wyrick or his clone as the city’s official Santa Claus. Most everyone, even children, realized Wyrick also was the fire chief. That didn’t matter when he put on his Santa suit and whiskers and roared a ho-ho-ho that went from ample belly to mouth. Wyrick cleaned up his vocabulary during the Christmas season — with one exception. He exploded with profanity in the late 1960s when young rowdies attacked his Christmas parade float.
   
• Require children sitting on Santa’s lap to conclude their lists of wants with “and lots of nuts and fruits and candies.” Every child used to say that.
   
• Bring back the lights shaped as a Christmas tree atop the original Jefferson Standard Building. They were nothing grandiose. They were just always there, just as Big Santa has become a fixture at Friendly Shopping Center. People could see the Jefferson lights from the suburbs.
   
• Return the woman to Hamburger Square who decorated the magnolia tree in Hamburger Square park (where Elm and McGee join) with buckets like those that contained pears and lard.
   
• Return Thelma Blake, or a lookalike, to Elm and Market streets in front of the old Belk department store, now an office building. In her blue uniform and matching bonnet, Blake operated the Salvation Army Christmas hut. Kettles attached to each side filled up with money. Christmas music blared from loud speakers. The hut and kettles have disappeared from downtown, although during the Festival of Lights the local army commander put a giant kettle in Hamburger Square.
   
• Rebuild the long-demolished S&W Cafeteria (not to be confused with the K&W) in the 100 block of East Market Street. With its three serving lines and organist Howard Waynick on the mezzanine, the S&W made lunch or dinner a Christmas treat for shoppers. The tea room in the old Meyer’s Department Store was a good alternative.
   
• Restrict saturation decorating to a few homes. Now it seems every street has an overly lighted home with too many figures. Duke Power, not the passing public, benefits the most. Less is better. Make exceptions for those modern decorations of lights and chicken wire that look as though they are floating. Also, keep luminarias lighted for more than one night.
   
• Bring back the downtown department stores. Christmas always brought wonderful fairyland decorations to their big windows. Stores competed to see which could outdo the other. Viewers lined up along the sidewalk. Now, at their suburban sites, department stores don’t always have windows.
   
• Of course, not all was rosy and cheery long ago. The department stores had a habit late in the day on Christmas Eve, while shoppers still shopped, of ripping down Christmas decorations. It was time to get ready for a January white sale or something. The scene was a real spirit killer.

Contact Jim Schlosser at 601-9879 or beale1@clearwire.net